


The Pink Sky

by votsalot



Category: Downton Abbey
Genre: Death, Other, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, War-Typical Violence, World War I, i also like researching, i like writing action scenes and character studies, so this got written, wwi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-06
Updated: 2017-08-06
Packaged: 2018-12-12 03:26:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,912
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11728506
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/votsalot/pseuds/votsalot
Summary: Some of Thomas's experiences in the Somme. No one wins in a war.





	The Pink Sky

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: Thomas was at the front for a while off-screen and in-between seasons – he's one of my favorite characters from Downton Abbey and doesn't get enough love, so I wanted to explore what he might have thought, felt, and seen. I feel like his experiences in war are discounted, given how he was sent back from the front. If you're interested in this type of information read "The Long Carry", by Frank Dunham! It’s a first-hand account of life in WWI for a R.A.M.C. stretcher bearer. I read it for research for this fic (and for fun), so if you're into history, I recommend it.
> 
> Trigger Warnings: Blood, death, graphic bodily injury, PTSD, hand-on-hand combat, execution

He had never imagined war this way, or this long, or so close. Even after formally volunteering for the front and going through his basic medic training, the war had seemed an abstract concept lying across the channel. Something at a distance, like looking through a telescope. He could see where he was going, but thought he'd never get there.

"War is a chance for change," he'd crowed to anyone who asked why he was going.

If he'd known change would look like men drowning in mud and shit, bleeding from stumps, or that the sounds of change would shake the earth with their bombast and tear his eardrums, he would have taken every white feather angrily brandished at him until he was called up.

If not now, it would have happened later, he tried to tell himself in his down moments. No matter how you cut it, you end up here. But still, Thomas could not rid the kernel inside of himself that damned him as a fool, nor could he ignore the shadow that followed him like a loyal dog, calling him a coward for the fear he felt when he slept at night.

He had to be awake, brave, and blind. Thomas had seen what happened to men who were afraid - the ones who couldn't stop seeing the insides of their best friend from back home tangled in their scarlet fists. They were tied to a chair, blindfolded, with a piece of white paper pinned over their heart, a surrendering of their life. And then they were shot by five men, four guns, and one blank. And then every man who pulled the trigger could solace in the dream that he'd been given the blank instead of a bullet.

Thomas had been on scene for two of these executions. He'd called time of death, grabbed a handsome face gently by the hair and looked into its empty eyes.

"He's dead."

And so the young man was - here, tied to a chair, shot by his mates - like a parody of the Germans who were shot and skewered in their trenches.

////////////////////////

Thomas was lucky to receive letters. No one from his family knew he was at the front, and no one at Downton was likely to care other than O'Brien. He usually got them twice a month on the condition there was no backlog of supply and mail shipments to the lines, and wrote replies just as often as he got something to reply to. He'd forgotten to respond once, his battalion busy preparing to go back to the front rotation for a raid the following day, and had received a concerned letter from not only O'Brien, but Mrs. Hughes as well. He could picture Mr. Carson handing out the letters morning mail, the distinct absence of Thomas's correspondence not unnoticed but going unremarked upon. A brief, pensive silence in which everyone at breakfast contemplated the variables of fate. No doubt some weren't bothered to think him dead.

Reading letters from O'Brien was like glimpsing a fairytale through a murky window, though he could clearly picture the life he'd led before the war. He could see the servant's hall in his mind's eye, but in O'Brien's cramped script it became to Thomas like the war once was. Abstracted. Downstairs the servants kept their stiff upper lips, and upstairs the Granthams bemoaned Sybil's need to demonstrate altruism (something they claimed to support, but not quite in so liberal the manner as their youngest daughter).

Thomas, O'Brien wrote. No preamble with a dear - he wasn't thick. They kept the pretext of friendship, but little else.

Hope you are well, the letter continued. 

Thomas cast a glance at the pile of unclaimed letters tucked behind the transport clerk. Letters which were addressed to dead men who'd passed in their hospital beds - truly, he was lucky to receive letters. 

Things are keeping up here as they have been. Mrs. Patmore complains about rations and Daisy tries to make do - she asked me for help to mend her apron, a button or some such, but I'm not daft, so now she's giving me sugar in my tea for payment.

William carries on about her, carries on and on about volunteering. If he wants to go so badly, he should just up and do it already. Soft lad. Doesn’t know what he’d be getting into. He asked after your letters the other day, says he wants to know what the front is like. You'll be happy to know I did not give them to him, though I don't think they'd be much help. You don't give much more than weather reports, Thomas. I'll admit it's not exciting to read. Keep us informed on developments.

Sincerely,

Sarah O’Brien

////////////////////////

"Don't let 'em get me," the soldier grasped Thomas's sleeve. He was a mere boy, his muddy uniform clinging to his adolescent body like a second skin. "I don' want'a be crucified-!"

Then the boy's remaining eye went wide with shock, and his clammy fingers relaxed. Soon they would stiffen again with rigor.

Thomas's fellow stretcher bearers sighed. 

"No need to hurry, lads," he told Thomas and the other two men. "We can't save him now." And so they carried the boy's corpse as far as the next wounded ally, picking up one living soul and leaving a dead one in its place. The mud sucked at their feet, shells and bullets flying overhead and around. And still they crawled like snails, slowly wading their way back to the cover of the deeper trenches.

"Did they really crucify that bloke in Ypres?" another corporal asked Thomas once they'd handed the wounded off to the field hospital. 

"Your guess is as good as mine."

////////////////////////

Some days were better than others. Thomas floated through the furrows and trails of the battlefield carrying the weight of the wounded and his own tired body. Usually the days after shell-filled, sleepless nights were the best - he was certain he was so numb from exhaustion and cold he wouldn't feel the bullet that killed him. But the killing stroke, again and again, never came, not even a graze. And with each trip over the top into No Man's Land, the fear that this was the trip his luck ran out grew larger.

He was a decent stretcher bearer to begin with - he was afraid but he did his work steadily and methodically, though the whole ordeal of the trenches had been unexpected when he volunteered. He and the other SB’s, as they called themselves, did not need to parade like the other men of the battalion. They took that time and tended to the blisters and aches of riflemen, wrapped slight burns on cooks’ fingers and plucked shrapnel shards from officer’s servants. Sometimes, they even got to take those hours for themselves, and spent them playing cricket or football well within the safe atmosphere of the Allied side of the war. But in the distance, shells still boomed like thunder without a storm. Men were still brought back from the front by the R.A.M.C. still on rotation, the Aid Station filled with the sounds of dying masses.

He swallowed the plausibility of his death like a tonic for a year and a half. And then one day his resolve forged by resignation was shattered in combat. 

It had been a typical night, full of mud-slinging and body bearing, the living taking priority over the dead and those who couldn’t be saved. Thomas had internalized the affectations of triage, and blocked from his ears the cries of men who would be dead in ten minutes whether they made it behind the lines or not. There were more wounded to transport than usual, a failed attempt at a raid from the previous night putting the duties of Thomas and the other SB’s solidly in No Man’s Land. In a way, it was worse than going over the top with the rest of the battalion, as they sometimes were required to do.

The Jerries seemed satisfied they’d beaten back the Tommy offensive, and the shelling and gunfire had slowly abated over the hours. Every few minutes, the guns chattered or a German whiz-bang exploded, but it was always farther down the line than where Thomas was. Even still, he didn’t dare allow himself to relax.

The morning light broke like an egg yolk seeping over the horizon, turning black to brown and bringing color to the battlefield. What little visible skin there was turned from ghostly to pink, and their uniforms were no longer grey, but awash in earth and greens. Morning time made work easier and harder - easier to see the wounded, harder to hide from the enemy.

“Is that you under all that dirt, Leons?” Graves chortled quietly. “You and Barrow are doing your best impressions of amphibians, looks like.”

“Oh, shut it,” Brown muttered, and Thomas sympathized. Graves lacked appropriate timing.

The plane was inconsequential at first - a single buzzing entity baptizing the new sky with its red body. They'd seen countless planes before. Sometimes they dropped bombs, other times they dodged the ground fire and completed their airborne reconnaissance of the other side’s trenches and weapons. The planes were to be feared in the way one fears the inevitable - a slow certainty it'll never happen to you, and the regrettable satisfaction of fulfilled expectation when it does.

Thomas paid it no mind, focused instead of the distant shells and machine gun chatter. They were clearly marked stretcher bearers, carrying wounded in the “lulls” between actions. No sporting soldier, German or not, would take a shot at them. No one with honor, anyway. But instead of progressing in a line straight across the expanse of No Man's Land, an elegant curve brought it down from the sky and closer to where they were trudging back towards the trench. Thomas, sure at first, began to doubt the integrity of the pilot. He remembered later, thinking to himself at that moment, how anyone could manage being such an arse.

"Lads," Leons, who was the newest bearer, pointed upwards. "Should we be worried abo-"

And then the world shook itself to pieces.

////////////////////////

Thomas came to slowly - he'd been in the black only a few seconds, but around him lay the carnage of a changed world. Limbs. Blood. He blinked. Held his hands up to the morning-muted sun. Both there. Feet. Legs. Arms.

Not his blood. Just a few bruises, scrapes across the exposed skin which had faced the explosion. A mysterious hole in the front of his rumpled uniform from which nothing seeped. He breathed. In. Out. In. Out.

Roll over. Evaluate.

"Leons." 

The body a few meters to the right of him might have been Leons, but it was impossible to identify it without a face. At least from this distance. No way to read the nameplates.

Thomas stared into the sky. The sky was empty.

"Brown." No answer. "Graves." 

What he would've given to hear "Barrow" echoed back to him, however faint. He repeated the names into the air for hours, stone still until he was sure no German sniper or plane had him in their sights. But the answer never came.

////////////////////////

In the course of the entire war, Thomas only killed three people that he knew of. The first two had been men, screaming, bleeding, horrific messes that seemed unable to die. 

“Please,” the words had bubbled from the red, frothing mouth of a rifleman who’d stuck his head too far over the top of a trench. Two sucking wounds gaped from his neck as his body slouched against the muddy wall behind him. “P….lease….”

The man was drowning in his own blood, and they were cut off from the usual way back to the Aid Post. There was no saving him, even with all of Thomas’s rolls of bandage. The blood would just keep seeping from his artery into his lungs, flowing from his body into the dirt. Thomas didn’t think. He placed his hand over the man’s lips and nose, and held it there for a few minutes, until the gurgling stopped. He wasn’t even sure if it was his hand that finished the job, or the natural course of injury.

“It was the right thing to do,” Piccard had told him. “The poor chap was going to die much more slowly if you hadn’t been there.” 

“If you say so.”

Piccard was the second man, a month later, though inadvertent. It was Thomas’s turn to spend the day in a hidden outpost with some riflemen from the battalion, situated a good 50 meters into No Man’s Land. Thomas had caught a touch of something ill-suited and couldn’t shake it, so Piccard had offered to go and be the SB on-duty in his stead. 

“I have the shift after anyhow, it doesn’t make a difference to me. One less trip across the open ground,” Piccard had rationalized through a puff of cigarette.

So while Thomas recouped in a warm and dry Aid Post, Piccard was the SB on-duty when a German shell hit the outpost unwittingly. Piccard was still alive when they brought him in, and he lived for four more days after Thomas returned to the front, until finally the shock of losing his limbs killed him. Leons arrived to replace him a few days later, fresh from a new draft.

////////////////////////

Brown, dead. 

Leons, dead. 

Graves, dead. 

Thomas had their nameplates safely tucked in his breast pocket to prove it. They’d need to be reported. After he’d stopped calling their names, certain of their death, Thomas had baked for hours in the sun as it rose higher in the sky. As night creeped down from the heavens, after an entire day doing his best impression of a corpse, Thomas risked inching over the ground towards what he assumed to be the bodies of his squad mates. His assumptions proving correct, he grabbed their plates as a matter of routine and began to strategize.

He felt the cold, wet soil engulf his hands as he crawled along on his chest – it was slow going, picking his way over bloated bodies and wading through mud up to his chin, ducking under barbed wire and disentangling his clothes as quietly as possible when they got caught. His hands were numb to the bite of the steel.

After an hour of this, Thomas was still too close to the enemy side of No Man’s Land. Every now and then the explosion of a shell would light the darkened sky ahead, or the characteristic sound of a whizz-bang would crack out from behind, and it was only this which let him know he was going in the right direction.

Rain had started falling hours ago, and with the wet hanging about in the air Fritz seemed to pack it in for the night. Thomas struggled to keep traction in the slick environment, fighting the moistening ground. He reached blindly forward with his hands, trying to find what was in front of him – and found the mud moving and collapsing beneath him. With a strangled cry he slid down into the muck of a shell-crater, banging against an upturned and abandoned duckboard on the way down. He was electrified at once by fear and disorientation.

He thrashed briefly at the bottom to be sure he wasn’t buried underneath the mud which had fallen into the crater with him, water soaking him through, and upon finding himself in the momentary free-and-clear of suffocation he immediately grew still. Inwardly, Thomas felt regret for the noise like an anvil on his chest. He waited, listening over the audible impact of the rain, for any sign his struggle had been heard.

After a few moments of silence, his hopes began to lift, and then -

“Hallo?” a foreign voice was carried to his ears. “Sind sie das, Schaffer?”

Thomas’s mind and body reeled with terror from the top of his head to his sodden toes – he grasped wildly in the muck around him for a weapon, his service pistol undoubtedly waterlogged to the point of uselessness.

“Schaffer? Hallo?” the voice grew closer, with the accompanying squelch of rubber in mud.

The water couldn’t soak in up above, and ran in small rivers from the top of the crater into Thomas’s eyes, mouth, ears. He was reminded of the rifleman, drowning in blood. He felt something hard in the soup of earth and pulled from the pool the butt of a rifle. Useless, like his pistol! But with mere moments of further thought, his addled brain remembered one word – bayonet. His fingers, numb from the cold and from the wet and from the pain, fumbled to remove the blade from the top of the gun.

“Geht es dir gut?”

There was no chance of him being taken prisoner, he was sure. It was dark, it was wet, and to this anonymous German soldier Thomas could be any number of things – danger was the foremost. If he didn’t do something, that would be it. Dead like the others.

He had to act.

He abandoned the attempt to pull the bayonet off the gun. He tucked the entire rifle under his arm, and then threw himself up the duckboard. For the rest of his life he was never able to comprehend how lucky he was to have scrambled and clawed his way up the sopping wooden slats in one try. He shot out of the crater like a demon out of hell, or as quickly as he could shoot, given the circumstances, and-  
-ran right into the solid body and wet woolen coat of the approaching German soldier.

“Was-?!” an awkward and surprised fist glanced across the top of his tin helmet, and Thomas tactically threw himself off to the side, away from the crater, landing on his back with a shock of pain. He could barely see the outline of his foe, but he could hear the clicking of a readying weapon.

“Sie sind nicht-!”

Now.

In an instant, he gripped the rifle in his hands and launched himself off the ground.

“HALT-“

CRACK.

There was a lancing, burning feeling across the top of his shoulder, quickly forgotten by the impact of his weapon hitting the man standing – no, falling – in front of him. Thomas landing hard on top of the other soldier, feeling the man writhe and struggle as he tried to fight the bayonet which pierced him. But it was a short spell of movement. Thomas felt the man’s blood flow over his fingers, and by inspecting carefully with his hands, he realized his upward thrust from the ground had cleanly, deeply, hit the other man where his neck began to turn into jaw.

God.

He slid off the quickly cooling body. His heart was beating wildly. He was sure soldiers on both side could hear his short and staggered breaths.

God.

One minute.

Two minutes.

Three.

Four.

The rainfall began to cease.

He had to go. The man – the body – beside him had been calling a name. Someone else was out here. He had to go. He had to go now.

Slowly, leaving the rifle behind, Thomas began crawling away from the pink line that was breaking on the horizon. Back towards home.

He took one last look behind him.

He choked.

The pinking sky didn’t erase the shadows of the nights so much as it diluted them, and the light had washed the anonymity from his third kill.

A boy.

Not a man.

Just a boy.

////////////////////////

When he was finally within the proximity of a friendly outpost, he was almost shot. As he raised a shaking hand to signal his status as an ally, a bullet cut the air next to his ear, another peppered the ground in front of him.

Hands – over ears.

Face – covered.

Reflex.

“IT’S FRITZ!” screeched a new addition to the battalion, jumpy and newly christened by the failed battle a few days prior.

“Oi, oi, oi! Hold your fire, you bloody idiot!” a more seasoned lookout thumped the boy on the back of his head, knocking his helmet askew. “He’s one of ours! Use your bleeding eyes, you soft fucking tart.”

Thomas let himself get dragged over the lip of the trench, and once there, he lapsed into a shaking fit. 

Hands. Here.

Arms. Here.

Feet. Here.

Legs. Here.

The only thing he felt, despite the obvious presence of his limbs, was the burning sting of the graze on his shoulder. It sunk down into him, the pain festering, and he couldn’t get out of his mind the face of the boy who gave it to him. 

Here.

Gone.

“Alright, alright. You’re here now, yeah? You’re safe.” The older man thumped him gruffly on the back after briefly inspecting the gaze left in Thomas’s upper sleeve. “We’ll get you to an Aid Post and get you back in proper shape. You’re not hurt badly, are you?”

Thomas said nothing. And after a while, he was sheparded into a small indent carved out of the side of the outpost, a spare blanket draped on his shoulders. A day later, the crew of the outpost brought him back to the line after they were relieved. He was deposited at an Aid Post, where once his graze was cleaned and wrapped, he was given a less-muddy uniform and discharged back to the SB squad. He made sure to hand over the nameplates of the dead SBs. 

Between this time, he had fumbled amidst the fugue in his brain to find his voice.

He did not want to find himself on the wrong end of a firing squad.

Treason.

Laughable.

Only in England would it be treason to feel fear.

“Heard you were alive!” Old Truenow laughed when he returned. “This lot here was hoping this would be a permanent position.” He gestured with a jerk of the thumb at the sheepish-looking company men who had been chosen to fill the now-empty spaces left by Graves, Brown, and Leons. And him.

“Sorry, lads,” Truenow tore at a dirty fingernail with his teeth. “Is there a volunteer, or are you going to draw straws? HQ sent him back to us, which means one of you is extra.” 

Thomas looked at the SBs, three permanent and one temporary. He saw the apprehension in their eyes, the unwillingness. The stubborn will to live, to have it a little easier.

“Sorry,” he said, taking a seat on the floor of the cellar the squad had claimed for themselves. He pulled out a cigarette, wetting the tip quickly with his tongue. He anticipated the brief touch of release it would give his nerves. “Rotten luck, really.”

////////////////////////

Two months later, he lit another cigarette in the dark. He held his lighter in his fingers. 

There could be no going back.

It had to be convincing. Not a discharge from his own weapon. They would count his bullets.

The lick of bullet he experienced earlier had healed entirely, nothing but a shiny pink scar. 

That’s all. 

That’s all it would be. 

But this time, a little bone in the way. 

Just a little bone, a little muscle. 

And then home.

He held his hand, he held his lighter.

He held them in the air, thumb pressed tightly on the flint wheel.

One.

He imagined a sniper. Lining up the sights.

Two.

He imagined a shell barrage, questioned its plausibility.

CRACK.

He had his answer.


End file.
